The judicious use of defaulting is important in the efficient use of
insn attributes. Typically, insns are divided into types and an
attribute, customarily called type, is used to represent this
value. This attribute is normally used only to define the default value
for other attributes. An example will clarify this usage.
Assume we have a RISC machine with a condition code and in which only full-word operations are performed in registers. Let us assume that we can divide all insns into loads, stores, (integer) arithmetic operations, floating point operations, and branches.
Here we will concern ourselves with determining the effect of an insn on the condition code and will limit ourselves to the following possible effects: The condition code can be set unpredictably (clobbered), not be changed, be set to agree with the results of the operation, or only changed if the item previously set into the condition code has been modified.
Here is part of a sample md file for such a machine:
(define_attr "type" "load,store,arith,fp,branch" (const_string "arith"))
(define_attr "cc" "clobber,unchanged,set,change0"
(cond [(eq_attr "type" "load")
(const_string "change0")
(eq_attr "type" "store,branch")
(const_string "unchanged")
(eq_attr "type" "arith")
(if_then_else (match_operand:SI 0 "" "")
(const_string "set")
(const_string "clobber"))]
(const_string "clobber")))
(define_insn ""
[(set (match_operand:SI 0 "general_operand" "=r,r,m")
(match_operand:SI 1 "general_operand" "r,m,r"))]
""
"@
move %0,%1
load %0,%1
store %0,%1"
[(set_attr "type" "arith,load,store")])
Note that we assume in the above example that arithmetic operations performed on quantities smaller than a machine word clobber the condition code since they will set the condition code to a value corresponding to the full-word result.